Good News Network marks October 22, 1797 as the day André-Jacques Garnerin made the first parachute jump, descending from 3,200 feet (1,000 m) above Paris.

Daily Kos places the same first at about 3,000 feet, describing a military engineer who rode aloft with a balloon pilot before separating for the descent.

Both accounts agree on the essentials: a balloon carried him upward, and a parachute carried him back down — the world's first successful descent and landing of its kind.

What made the leap genuinely surprising was the design. According to Good News Network, Garnerin's early parachute was based on an umbrella-shaped device lifted by a balloon, with a gondola attached to a silk parachute.

Daily Kos adds a delightful wrinkle: the successful jump vindicated an idea and drawings made roughly 200 years earlier by Leonardo da Vinci. A da Vinci sketch that had sat on paper for two centuries finally became a working machine over the fields outside revolutionary Paris.

The details line up across independent tellings. Good News Network records the date as October 22, 1797 and the height as 3,200 feet (1,000 m), while Daily Kos, writing its own 'History Corner' for October 22, reports a height of about 3,000 feet and identifies Garnerin as a military engineer.

The appetite for firsts on this date never ran out: in 2026, MS NOW reports that eight women made history as the oldest group of rowers to compete in the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. Garnerin needed silk and courage; they needed synchronicity and endurance.

Good News Network's 'Good News in History' column shows how often this date rewards bold experimenters.

Fifty-one years ago, in 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 became the first mission to enter orbit around Venus and return images from the surface of another planet, with cameras operational two minutes after touchdown.

And 147 years ago, in 1879, Good News Network recounts that Thomas Edison, after frustrating months with platinum wire, tried carbonized cotton thread and produced the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb, which burned for 13½ hours.

Firsts are the raw material of optimism, and this date keeps generating them.

Beyond Garnerin, Good News Network notes that nine years ago a 30-foot-tall totem pole was returned home to Alaska's Tlingit tribe after an 84-year odyssey, and Daily Kos recalls the first telegraph line linking America's coasts, completed by Western Union in 1861.

Row2k's report of the eight record-setting rowers at the Head of the Charles shows the tradition is alive in 2026.